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High labour turnover

Other Names:

Instability of the labour force

Nature:

Continual recruitment and training of new workers constitutes a significant drain on the efficiency and earnings of industry.

Incidence:

[Developing countries] Industrial costs are raised by the instability of the labour force. In most of the less developed countries, there is a constant flux of workers between industrial employment in towns and traditional agriculture in their home villages. People are reluctant to enter permanent employment off the land. They may work only long enough to collect the money they need to pay taxes or to fulfil other obligations; they often become homesick and dissatisfied with their food and quarters, particularly if they have left their wives in the villages; lacking means of expressing their grievances and improving their status, they may move from industry to industry seeking better conditions. Attempts to stabilize the industrial labour force by means of a variety of incentives - holidays with pay contingent upon a certain period of steady work, regular wage increases for those who stay on the job, provision of appropriate facilities for eating, housing, health, education, recreation and so on - have often met with no more than limited success.

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The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential is a collaboration between UIA and Mankind 2000, started in 1972. It is the result of an ambitious effort to collect and present information on the problems with which humanity is confronted, as well as the challenges such problems pose to concept formation, values and development strategies. Problems included are those identified in international periodicals but especially in the documents of some 60,000 international non-profit organizations, profiled in the Yearbook of International Organizations.

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